My New Hearing Aids Are Driving Me Nuts

With Oticon there are three tiers of technology: basic, enhanced, and premium. My old ones were premium, they had seven or eight channels of amplification so they were very specific about what they amplified. My new ones are enhanced, they were the best I could afford this time around even with insurance helping. These only have five channels of amplification so to make sure I’m being fed all the stuff I’d normally miss some of the stuff that I can already hear is being amplified too. Sometimes I have to mute them because of sensory overload when I’m at work.

I’ve never had problems with sensory overload before my most recent brain melting last year. I guess it’s just something I’m going to have to learn to cope with on occasion from now on. At least it’s hitting me now as an adult and not as a pre-verbal child so I have a vocabulary I can use to explain what’s going on when I need to step away.

At some point over the past few weeks I “woke up” and started feeling much much better than I have in a long time. I mean the executive dysfunction is still there but I can usually power through it to get started. So far in the past two weeks I’ve managed to replace the blower motor in my truck, replace the battery in my lawn tractor, get rid of my old janky mattress and put a different one in my room, and started the process of changing out my bed frame to use the new mattress. I’m using the mattress from the guest room, which is an older mattress but it hasn’t been slept on much at all. It’s a queen sized though, and my old one was king sized and the old frame is not adjustable. I’m having to move the four-poster bed frame into my room and I’m having to make some modifications so it’ll a) fit under the ceiling fan and b) support me. I should be able to finish that this weekend. Hopefully. It’s really high though, so the dismount when I get up in the morning is going to take some getting used to.

School is going ok, I nearly failed my last class, Network Defense, but it was because of late or missing assignments and not a lack of understanding of the material. My current class is about Ethics and the Law in Cybersecurity and I’m not having any problems so far, I usually get stuff turned in no later than lunchtime on Sunday (everything is due at midnight local time).

Talked to my therapist today, and told her I think I want to wrap things up, and she said I seemed to be in a good enough place to do that, so December 1 will be my last session provided I don’t freak out or anything during the day after Thanksgiving sale. We’re still dreadfully undermanned, and this whole quarter is going to be exhausting, but it’s not actually management’s fault this time. They’ve been doing several interviews each day and hiring like mad, but people just won’t show up for work. Last Thursday we had five people out, last Sunday the same, and three or four on Monday.

We had four out on Thursday again, and the schedule was already too light for a Thursday to begin with. It was a mess. Our morning shift hourly manager has been out, and our salaried manager hasn’t had to get into the minute to minute operation of a front end for a while and was missing things. Our customer service person was also out so he was having to do that too since you can’t just throw anyone up there. When we finally got a CS person in the building he vanished for almost two hours, I’m not sure where he was. That, by default, left our CS person in charge. The only problem is she has ZERO management experience and while she’s got the vocabulary she doesn’t have the theory. Kind of like when Saavik didn’t understand the prefix code trick in Wrath of Khan: she knows how things work but not why things work and as a result people were getting relieved for their lunches and breaks way out of order and way late. I kind of nudged here and there and tried to help without making it look like I knew she was clueless. Our salaried manager came back in and asked me how things were going (no idea why) and I gave him a quick update, let him know why I was doing a two-person job by myself, that I’d be going to lunch when the people I had bumped out returned, that we should be out of the hole we were in before our closing hourly manager came in, and that our CS person was in charge. He asked why she was in charge. Yeah, he asked me why she was in charge. I just had a mild blue screen moment and said, “she has the conch.” Luckily he understood the reference and rushed off to be all leaderly and what not and relieve her of her unwanted duties. The day went on fairly smoothly from there, I went to lunch and when I got back the closing hourly manager was in charge putting out fires and getting the admin work caught up as best she could. I ended up putting away returns the rest of the day, I’m not sure if I was being punished or not.

Ewww. watching something on the History channel and they’re bleeding someone to release the evil humors making them sick. Y’all if this is an accurate depiction that was a huge ass blade they used. And on that note I think I’m going to start winding down for bedtime now. I’ve been listening to “green noise” videos on YouTube to help me get to sleep. I have some experience in the audio/sound reinforcement business so I understand “white noise” and “pink noise” but I have no clue what’s going on with all the other different colors of noise. How does noise have a color anyway? Read one of my links and found the answer, lol. I guess we all learned something new today.